Author: ToorAdmin

What happened in 2018 on Toornament?

Another year is coming to an end already, and it is time to pause for a minute and do a quick retrospective on what happened on your favorite esports platform in 2018.
Back in 2017, we released the V.2 of Toornament, and kept building on its strong foundations to make sure the platform spearheaded the esports ecosystem.
This translated into a +100% growth this year (in number of tournaments created), so huge thanks and congratulations to our organizers!

New Features

Structure

The most important feature that was added early 2018 was the Free-for-All update, especially designed for Battle Royale games, with advanced settings and scoring options.
In the same update, we also revamped the Match Settings entirely (to accommodate the new ones for Battle Royale), and added Double Finals configuration for Double-Elimination brackets (with the possibility to have a Grand Finals reset for the Winner Bracket finalist).

For Organizers


One of the main features we brought for organizers in 2018 was the ability to declare a participant Forfeit in a match, and attribute penalty points for said forfeit.
Other features to ease up the organizers’ life include Tournament Duplication and Registration Auto-Accept.

For Participants


We of course do not forget participants in our efforts to provide the best esports platform there is, and the main one this past year was probably the Tournament Check-In, which is of course made for both organizers and participants.
Other new features include the ability to edit one’s registration and the Krosmaga Pick&Ban.

For Developers


As we want to be the leading B2B esports solution, we strongly invested in our public API, which has seen some major improvements this year, with new endpoints and webhooks currently being tested!

For Partners

And because our platform would mean nothing without its amazing community of talented organizers, we developed the Tournament Playlists to let our Organizer Partners gather their tournaments in a single list, and share it via one of our well-known widgets!

Improvements

Design


Concurrently with the new features, the interface of the website has evolved, with many design improvements to make it more user-friendly and accessible. The major enhancement was the Responsive Layout of the whole platform, for people to use it from their mobile browser in the best conditions.
The platform also received several upgrades, with the new dynamic Organizer Dashboard that accompanies organizers in their tournament management, the new Match Sheet developed with the experience gained from the Free-for-All formats and a brand new and better Tournament Creation Process.

Other


Another important update this year was the addition of Tooltips and Revamped Settings to provide contextual help and a better navigation experience.

Upcoming in 2019


It would be an understatement to say that 2018 was a good and interesting year, and as you may have noticed the trend, we plan on making the next one even more incredible. As of now, we are working on two projects that should keep us busy for the Christmas holidays, and that you may already have heard about:

  • The FFA Brackets to build complex structures for your favorite Battle Royale games, Racing Sims or Smash Bros!
  • Localization of the platform in several languages, to make it available to most people.

And that’s just the beginning, with many more to come, so rendezvous in 2019!

Are you ready for Super Smash Bros Ultimate?

The new opus of the most famous crossover fighting game launches tomorrow, and the competitive scene is ready… Are you?
With more characters than ever, there is plenty of choice for you to find the one character that you like and are good with to climb the ladder and reveal the champion that lies within!

The tournaments started as early as this summer, with the Invitational tournament held during the E3 at Los Angeles:

The game has a bright future ahead of him, and we can not wait to see what our organizers have in store, especially with all these Smash tournaments already popping up on the platform, hours before the release!

The FFA Brackets are coming to Toornament!

How about an early Christmas? Ever since we released the Free-for-All on the platform, we knew the next big step structure-wise would be to provide a satisfactory bracket solution, for you to have participants move forward after a match.
We have been working hard to make sure that the bracket would be sound, with an algorithm specifically designed for FFA, for participants’ progression and respecting competitive integrity.

We could have just increased the number of people in matches, and have winning players move in the next match, along with the other players from their match. But that means two winning players would keep being in the same game until the end of the stage, or one of them was eliminated. So we devised a new algorithm, that will split players in matches to make sure two players do not play each other again too soon (of course, they will meet again in the Finals if they keep winning, just like in a Double Elimination Bracket).

The players (represented by different colors) are dispatched into different matches so they meet again at the latest stage possible in the bracket (here the Grand Finals).
But this one is easy, with 4 players and 2 qualified players per match… But what if there are matches with 100 players, and 20 of them qualify? Or matches of 9 with 3 who qualify? Well, it works too!
This new bracket will be set up using its size, just like any other stage, but also how many participants will take part in each match, and how many of them will win in each match, to qualify for the next round. This will allow you to alter the structure and create the bracket you really need!

So stay tuned for more information about this new complex stage soon!

Ring of Elysium, the new Battle Royale sensation, has arrived in Europe!

Ring of Elysium is now available on the European Servers of Steam!
This Battle Royale, made by Tencent, has a few new mechanics that really make it stand out from the crowd, namely the Mobility Packages, a simplified inventory management, choice of deployment on a map etc.

If its competitive aspects are still to be proven, the game is definitely fun, and trying it with friends is a no-brainer if you are into the genre!
Plus, it’s free to play, with skins to unlock and other goodies.

Its map and mobility options offer a fast-paced and tense gameplay that is somewhat closer to Islands of Nyne than PUBG, for those who want the thrill of surviving the longest possible, but while offering a quick and action-packed experience.

So it comes to no surprise that the game has been available on Toornament since its first release on the Garena client, and with Custom Lobbies punctually available (and hopefully definitely soon!), you should give it a try, and why not organize your own RoE Tournament?

Meet the Partner: Game kNight

Today, we meet with an organizer that discovered the platform quite recently, but quickly saw its potential and took to himself to get the most out of it. He organizes on a game that you may not be really familiar with, but that boasts a really motivated and loyal community. Time to let him talk!

To start, please introduce yourself and your project

My name is Tobias, I’m 38 years old and I run the YouTube channel Game kNight Plays. I also frequently stream on Twitch.
Back in November 2015, when I started YouTube, it was based on a single game; Mordheim: City of the Damned. At the time, I didn’t see myself running a tournament or even playing that much PvP, but after just a couple of months myself and five other YouTubers got together to form the Mordheim YouTube League. But the game itself didn’t support it, so I had to get creative.

I created an excel document with several sheets, one for the rules, one for the YouTubers to register results in and another one to display the results in videos.
It was a huge success for my channel, but also for my experience with creating a tournament from the ground up – so it is something I look back at with joy, despite all the manual work.

Even before the end of the YouTuber tournament, several people were asking if they could join in – and it got me thinking about making a fully public tournament, for more people – but the thought of manually administering a larger tournament scared me!
I kept working on my system and rules – for a game that is not really designed for PvP progression tournaments – but when Toornament announced that Mordheim was available, I announced the beginning of the Buddyhood Brawl League (BBL).

We have steadily grown from 6 to 24 participants, and are now in the middle of the Third Edition of the BBL, with the BBL4 already in preparation for no less than 32 players, which will make it the largest progression tournament in Mordheim COTD history!

How did you discover Toornament?

A Tweet from the game developer which game I had been covering for 2 years – “Mordheim: COTD is now on Toornament!” – and of course I had to be among the first ones to create a tournament on the platform.
Toornament lets me arrange the structure of the tournament, which I spent way too many hours on manually doing in my previous excel sheets. It creates a transparency of whom you’ll fight next and what the results are without any hassle. It is truly the main reason that the BBL exists to this day, and the main reason why we have been able to expand from just 6 players to now soon 32.

What feature(s) do you like the most on Toornament?

I love the flexibility of Toornament and easy to use interface. People can report their own matches seamlessly in an environment that is visually nice to behold and it is easy for me, as a tournament creator, to follow the progression. Toornament allows for complex tournament setups like for my progression based league in Mordheim: COTD.

Anything you want to add?

I would like to thank my community, the kNightly Buddyhood, for sticking with me and going with my crazy ideas and supporting me in creating the best possible tournament system for Mordheim: COTD – Especially Wfenrir, my community manager and friend. His work and sparring on the BBL rules set has been invaluable to me. Also a shout-out to my wonderful moderators BTWRant, Rarator and Begbras – without all of you guys our community wouldn’t exist today!
Of course a huge thanks goes out to Rogue Factor for making the wonderful game that has captivated me and many others – one day, maybe one day, we will see a Mordheim 2, which could implement some of the work we have done today, into the game!

The eSports scene is growing, and I do honestly think there is a place for games like Mordheim somewhere in there – but in the end it depends a lot on the game itself – thanks to Toornament I have a chance to show the developers that it can be done. I wish to grow the Mordheim Community even further and my ambition is to have a US league and a EU league in the future, that can run yearly.

We want to thank Tobias for his time answering our questions, and we will of course be here to help the BBL keep growing!

Are mobile esports the new/next big thing?

The backlash that Blizzard endured after their Diablo Immortal announcement fueled the never-ending debate about mobile gaming, and as an extension of it, mobile esports. We have witnessed the birth and rise of the mobile platform as a serious contender in esports events, even though it is still considered as inferior by many. But nowadays, those mobile devices that follow us along everywhere we go are pure technology condensed, and video game editors would be foolish not to make good use of this new platform.
Especially considering that mobile gaming now represents the majority of the global video games market, with 51% of the expected $137.9 Bn to be made in 2018 (Source: Newzoo).

We have seen games adapted to fit the phones, with Fortnite, PUBG and Hearthstone coming to mind immediately, and some native mobile games like Clash Royale grab a fair share of the attention lately, with online tournaments, official pro circuits and LAN events offering cash prizes that have nothing to be ashamed of in comparison to some of the big names of the industry.

ESWC PGW 2018 – Samsung Fortnite Mobile Tournament

And it’s not just about the professionals, these games present the huge advantage of being easily available, and playable by everyone, so there is no wonder that they represent a non-negligible part of the community tournaments organized this year. Fortnite, of course, leads the way, and its cross-platform gameplay makes it difficult to exactly know the portion of players enjoying the game on a mobile device, but things get clearer when you look at PUBG Mobile and Clash Royale, two games that are exclusive to mobile, and that have seen an incredible rise in numbers this year (on Toornament, PUBG Mobile went from not existing to Top 2 in just 6 months, only outdistanced by Fortnite!).

So that would be an understatement to say that we do believe in mobile gaming and mobile esports, given that ultimately, the players are the one making the calls, and it’s pretty obvious that the platform matters less than the quality of the game!

Best Case: Riot Games organizes the French Collegiate League with Toornament!

Riot Games is launching La Grosse Ligue (the Big League), the French League of Legends Collegiate League.
The League is built around the 12 French regions, with three tournaments per region, where teams are seeded based on their in-game rank. Each of the three Tiers (Baron, Dragon and Herald) boasts a different structure, that also depends on the number of participating teams in the region.

Here are all of the Grosse Ligue tournaments:

To accomplish this, Riot Games chose to trust Toornament for our wide array of structures, and flexibility of our points system to accommodate their specific rules. We built a custom registration tool for teams to apply and provide scholarship certification, and more than 500 teams across the country answered the call. The teams were then imported in their respective tournaments using the Toornament API.

Thanks to the integration with the League of Legends Tournament Codes, the matches can now be played seamlessly by the players, with results automatically reported to the platform.

“Our goal at Riot Games France is to create local solutions that resonate with the French audience, and given France’s complex tertiary educational system, we needed to create a highly modular and flexible tournament system to answer those needs. We entered into the production stage with some trepidation, as we believed that implementing the format was not something that was easy to solve.
However, Toornament was able to provide the perfect product that we were looking for to create an amazing tournament experience for French university students.”
– Howon Lee, Esports Lead at Riot Games

The first matches were held on the 7th of November, and the League is bound to last several weeks, where the competition will move to the national level, with the best teams competing for prizes against the best teams from the other regions.

Here is the trailer for the competition:

Find all results on Toornament, and on the Grosse Ligue official website!

New tournament creation interface

We want to make the tournament creation and configuration process as quick and easy as possible for our organizers.
To that end, we today update the tournament creation process, by making it a single page with advanced and smart fields, so creating a tournament is faster and easier than ever! Indeed, the suggested games now depend on your own history of tournament creation, so if you are a true fan of a game, you will see it pop first in the list!

That follows the previous update to the Organizer Dashboard which became more user-friendly, to guide you through all stages of your tournament configuration, while putting the important features forward.

Go ahead and try it out, and as always, let us know what you think about it!

New structure widgets are available!

Tournaments organized on Toornament.com all come with a set of Widgets, for organizers to share their tournament information easily on any website.
Until now, available widgets were as follow:

  • Registration
  • Tournament
  • Schedule
  • Stage

We have drastically increased the number of widgets available, by adding all levels of structure to the widgets that you may now use. Indeed, you can now not only display a stage in a widget, but also a group, a round, a match or even a single game!

Group Widget – League of Legends Worlds 2018, Play-In Group Stage

Match Widget – FaceIT Major London 2018 Grand finals

FFA Game Widget – Fortnite Royal Rumble All Stars

These widgets will let you display what you deem the most interesting or important about your tournament, or share individual matches with your press services or other partners
To learn more about these new widgets, and how to use them, see our Widget Guide on the Help Center!